


tell me you love me, just one time

by Kats_watermelon



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, memori week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 12:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14811282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kats_watermelon/pseuds/Kats_watermelon
Summary: i'm just gonna.....leave this herewritten for memori week day 4: angst





	tell me you love me, just one time

**Author's Note:**

> i'm just gonna.....leave this here  
> written for memori week day 4: angst

“The collar has a tracker, so we need to keep moving,” Emori says, peering around a tree. “We can rest here for a few minutes.”

John nods, scratching at the skin around the collar. Emori wants to put her hand on his neck, touch the bruises and his skin and remember what it used to be like-

She turns away, pulling her bag off her shoulder and sorting through the supplies she brought. There is a radio there that the Eligius people won’t be able to hack. She tries it, but they’re out of range.

“Emori, I-”

“We should get moving,” Emori says, not allowing him to speak. “They’re probably already tracking you.”

He swallows and follows her through the woods. She fights back everything she’s felt in the last six months - anger and confusion and rage and hurt and crippling sadness and then back to anger - and pushes onwards. She has to fight back everything she’s felt in the last six hours as well - anger and fear and worry and relief and guilt - and pretend that John’s wincing walk from his bruises doesn’t hurt somewhere dangerously close to her heart.

They reach another spot on the tether and the collar goes off. John collapses to the ground, his fingers clawing at his throat as he convulses. Tears spring into Emori’s eyes as she reaches down to help him but can’t without electricity pushing her back. He finally rolls over until the collar stops. He pushes himself up on his knees, gasping for breath. Emori crouches next to him, putting her hand on his shoulder.

“Are you okay?” she asks. He just wheezes out a laugh.

“This is nothing compared to what they did to me on the ship.”

She swallows. She won’t ask. She won’t ask him.

“Why did you stay behind?” she finally demands, the words bursting from her mouth without her permission. “Why did you stay?”

He looks away from her. She grows angry.

“Fine, don’t talk to me.” She stands. “You’re good at that.”

A muscle ticks in his jaw and he gets unsteadily to his feet and walks on. Emori curls her hands into fists but continues walking.

“Madi said the cave is up here,” she says after a minute, taking the lead. “It’s well-hidden. We can hide there for a little while. It doesn’t look like they’re trying to follow us yet. Maybe we can stay overnight.”

John says nothing to that, just follows her. She recognizes the rock formations and swallows the lump in her throat as she realizes where they are. She ducks quickly into the cave, trying not to look at anything.

_He picks up her hand and presses it to his chest, his eyes impossibly soft. She can’t hide her shock at the action and soon enough his lips are against hers again and she’s laughing, her heart expanding like a bubble in her chest-_

She swears under her breath, slamming her eyes shut and counting to twelve. Twelve reasons she can’t look at John without her chest collapsing inwards.

_1. He stopped speaking about what was in his heart_

_2\. He wouldn’t look me in the eye_

_3\. He spit venom in my face and called it perfume_

_4\. He started to lie about why he was sad_

_5\. He couldn’t change, even when I begged him to_

_6\. He put our love six feet under when he let me force him to leave -_

John curses out the collar and Emori turns to see him clutching his right hand in his left. His fingertips are burnt, the way the skin around the collar is.

“Fucking thing won’t come off,” he mutters. She reaches up to touch him, out of instinct, but her fingers hesitate before they reach his face.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” she asks softly.

“I thought you didn’t want to,” he says, his eyes deep and sad, and they’re the same words he threw in her face six months ago, but now there’s no venom, just regret. Her fingers touch the sharp line of his jaw and he closes his eyes.

“Why did you stay?” she asks.

“What else am I good for?” he replies.

“John.”

“What else am I good for?” he repeats, opening his eyes to look at her, and she hates that her chest aches at the sight of tears in his eyes. “What else could I have done?”

“You could have come with us,” she says. “You could have come to the ground, and then you wouldn’t have-”

She shuts her mouth before she says something stupid. _He wouldn’t have been captured. He wouldn’t have been tortured. He wouldn’t have been broken._

His eyes harden and he says, “Why do you care, anyways? I thought you _wanted_ me to stay behind.”

She jerks her hand away from him like she’s been burned and she immediately sees regret flash in his eyes.

_I care because I still love you, even if I’m angry with you right now_.

She turns away and picks up a few sticks and branches, tossing them into a pile. She finds a good couple rocks and crouches down next to her pile, striking the rocks together until she gets a spark that lights the wood. She throws the rocks aside and double-checks that the cave entrance is well-covered. When she turns, John is sitting silently in front of the fire, warming his hands. She sighs and sits opposite to him, across the fire.

“Get some sleep,” she says. He looks up at her, surprised. “They’re clearly not tracking us yet and this cave is well-hidden. I’ll take first watch.”

“I can take first watch,” he says immediately, but she stops him with a sad smile.

“You look like hell,” she says lightly. “I’ll take first watch.”

She waits for him to lay down and shut his eyes to let tears well up in hers. _What are they doing?_ Five years, they had it figured out. Five years, they never would have thrown their words at each other like poisonous knives. Five years, they were happy.

But he is incapable of change.

_No, he isn’t_ , a small voice says. _He changed for you._

She closes her eyes and one tear slips out.

After a few hours, she wakes him up and lays down to rest, but she can’t fall asleep. She settles for watching him with her eyelids half-shut. In the first fifteen minutes, he just watches the entrance to the cave. Then he reaches up to the collar and runs his finger along it, trying to find a hinge. When he finds one, he lifts his other hand up and tries to pry it open. The collar buzzes softly and his fingers jerk away, slightly burnt. He hisses a curse in pain and tries a few more times before giving up. He glances over at her and she closes her eyes a little further. She hears him sigh and shift where he’s sitting. She cracks one eye and sees him with his hand pressed to his mouth, tears running over his fingers. Her chest tightens and he curls in on himself, shaking from silent sobs.

She fights back tears of her own, thinking of all the times she’s seen him cry. There aren’t many.

She used to get up and sit next to him. She used to let him lean on her, to hold him in her arms. She used to kiss the tears off his cheeks and promise to be there.

Now she just lays silently, trying to remember why she isn’t doing anything.

She must fall asleep at some point, because when John wakes her up, light from the morning sun illuminates the cave entrance. He let her sleep longer than she let him sleep. She would be angry if she didn’t see the barely-hidden stain of tears on his cheeks.

“We should get going,” she says, standing and putting out the fire. “They’re probably going to renew the search now that it’s morning.”

John nods and she gathers up their supplies, slinging the bag and her rifle over her shoulder. They leave and trek through the forest for a while, stopping once or twice to get berries and eat. John hits the tether again and Emori fights back tears while trying to figure out which way they came from. Finally he gets back on the right side of the tether, small spasms running up his body from the electricity. He doesn’t get up for a few minutes this time and Emori’s hands hover over him anxiously.

“Are you okay?” she asks. He just shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut. She touches the burned skin of his neck around the collar and wonders if it will leave a scar.

“Let’s keep going,” he says, pushing himself to his knees and then his feet. “I’m fine.”

It’s not until after the sun has gone down that they hear shouts in the woods and bullets whip by Emori, stirring her hair. She pulls John to the ground until the bullets stop flying, then they run.

“There’s a girl with him!” one of the Eligius men shouts. “We’re looking at two hostiles, here!”

Emori pulls John to a stop behind a tree and runs through their options.

“They’re tracking us now,” she says, her mind racing ahead at a million kilometers per hour. “We need to keep moving. Maybe we can figure out a way to get the collar off-”

John takes her face into his hands, surprising her into silence, his thumbs brushing gently over her cheeks.

“I love you,” he says softly, and kisses her once. When he pulls back, his lips quirk up into a familiar smirk.

And then he’s gone, sprinting away into the trees.

“John!” she screams, realizing what he’s done. She tears after him, but she’s lost him already. She can’t tell where he’s gone. She reaches for her gun but it’s gone, he must have taken it with him. _The idiot!_ She hears shouts and runs towards them, silently and swiftly. She ducks into a bush when she sees two of the Eligius crew running past.

“I have a visual on Murphy!” one shouts. “Shock him!”

She almost leaps out of the bushes, but stays back when she sees the rifle slung over one man’s back. She doesn’t know how trigger-happy they are, not yet. She’s no help to John dead. She hears him cry out and a loud crash as he falls to the ground and she bites down on her lip so hard she tastes blood, tears threatening to spill out. She’s no help to John dead, she reminds herself. She’ll wait to see what they do with him first.

She regrets it when she remembers his exhausted laugh and the lingering pain in his voice when he said, “This is nothing compared to what they did to me on the ship.” They will hurt him. They are already hurting him.

She sees them haul him up off the ground between two of them and drag him towards camp. He is cursing, struggling, fighting back. They’ve taken the gun from him. She follows silently, ducking behind trees and into bushes every time she thinks they might see her. They take him back to the camp and push him to his knees in front of the woman in charge. Emori hides a few meters away from the tree line, waiting for the perfect opportunity to break onto the scene and get him out. She just has to figure out how to get the shock collar off of him. Then she’ll go rescue his stupid ass and they’ll get the hell out of there, go find the others, and figure out the plan to get the Eligius people off their planet.

Her lips still tingle from the kiss he pressed to them.

_I love you too, you fucking idiot._

She’ll get him back, then she can tell him herself.

“We know that there’s someone else out there with you,” the woman says. “Where is she?”

John just glares up at her defiantly. One of the men, most likely their second-in-command, grabs John by the collar of his jacket. John’s gaze drops from the woman to Emori and then to the ground.

“Where is she?” the man demands. John says nothing, just stares at the ground. The man punches him in the jaw and blood drips from his knuckles. Emori presses her hands to her mouth, tears running over her fingers. John spits blood from his mouth but says nothing. The shock collar goes off and he falls to the ground, convulsing, but when the shocks end, he lays on the ground, panting, and says nothing.

“Tell us what we need to know!” the man shouts. “Where is the girl?”

“Go fuck yourself,” John says. The man looks at the leader. She looks down at John, clearly bored.

“He’s useless to us. Kill him.”

Emori meets John’s eyes across the meters between them as they pull him to his knees and she’s running, she has to get to him in time, she can’t let them do this -

She sees his mouth form the words “I love you” before the shot rings out.

His head snaps back with a flash of red and she lets out a scream of rage and grief, knives in both hands as she bursts from the trees. The Eligius crew members turn, surprised, and she cuts down five of them before a bullet catches her in the arm and she drops one of her knives. She’s wrestled to the ground barely a half a meter away from John and she lets out a single sob as she feels the grass, wet with his blood.

“Well, we found the girl,” the woman says. The men around her let out ugly laughs and Emori feels a shock collar clamp down around her neck. They haul her to her feet, taking her knives.

“Where are the others?” the woman asks. “Where have they gone?”

Emori spits at her, struggling against the men holding her back. She winces as one of them wrenches her injured arm and the sight of John’s eyes, open and staring at the sky, in the corner of her eye is enough for her to push past the pain and twist her body around and sink her teeth into the man’s shoulder. She kicks the other in the back of the knee and wraps her arm around his neck, jerking backwards as quickly as she can, just like Echo taught her. The snap reverberates down her spine and she drops the man, grabbing one of her knives off the ground and throwing it at the woman. She sidesteps it easily, that same bored expression on her face, the one she wore when she killed him-

The shock starts in Emori’s neck and she screams, falling to the ground and convulsing from the pain. It feels like someone has shoved a white-hot poker in the wound in her arm. When the shock ends, she doesn’t have the strength to stand again. She instead drags herself to John, blood-soaked grass slippery under her palms, placing her hands on his face and screaming at him to get up, to stand, to _live_.

“Take her inside,” the woman says. “I think we might be able to get more information out of her.”

“What about the body?” one of the men left standing asks. Emori wraps her hand around John’s, kissing his forehead and pushing his eyes closed. She curls over him, sobbing. The idiot, the dumbass, the man she promised to love until she died-

“Leave it for the others to find.”

**Author's Note:**

> :))))))))


End file.
